Dearly Beloved
by nicnac918
Summary: Mabel wants to show her new Grunkle her scrapbook full of all the fun stuff she and Dipper have done this summer. Like the time they had a memorial services for someone who looked identical to Grunkle Stan. You know, fun stuff like that.


"Great Uncle Ford!"

Ford checked his watch. He'd made it an entire four and a half minutes of being up in the main house this time before one of the children had called for his attention; they were getting slow.. Not to mention it was rare for Mabel to beat her brother to the punch. Sometimes Ford suspected Dipper of lying in wait in the gift shop, so he could ambush Ford as soon as he came up from the basement.

Really, Ford could save himself a lot of time if, instead of coming upstairs whenever he needed to eat, he were willing to dip into the supply of food that Stan had stocked in the basement in preparation for Armageddon – proof that Stan had paid at least some attention to all the warnings that Ford had left, he supposed. But having access to a real kitchen, with a refrigerator and a stove and an oven and all the other accessories seemed like too much of a luxury to him to pass it up. Besides, it was nice having people who were so excited to see him and to get to spend time with him. That wasn't something that Ford had gotten a whole lot of in his life.

"Hello Mabel," Ford said. He smiled at her as brought his plate of food and his soda over to the table and sat down. Ford was genuinely fond of his niece – she was bright, enthusiastic, and charming – even if he didn't understand her as well as he did Dipper. And he really wished she would stop making him finger puppets. "What can I do for you?"

"To the contrary, this is about what I can do for you," Mabel said, taking the seat next to him. Mabel had a certain flair and razzle dazzle about her, a natural sort of showmanship, almost, that always put Ford in mind of Stanley, especially the Mr. Mystery persona he'd developed to go with the hokey freak show thing he turned Ford's house into. Ford tried not to hold that against her. "Wha-bam!" she cried, slamming a book down on the table.

"Summer Memories?" he read off the cover.

"It's my scrapbook," Mabel explained "I know that Dipper wrote all about the stuff we've done this summer in your journal, but I thought you might want to see pictures of it too." Mabel opened the scrapbook and began flipping through, pointing out photos as she went. "Like here's when me and Dipper first got to Gravity Falls, and here's the fishing trip we went on with Grunkle Stan and Soos, and look here, this is the time me and Dipper solved the mystery of who killed Wax Stan and stopped the wax man uprising."

Ford recalled reading Dipper's account of the incident in his journal, but when Dipper had mentioned a wax figure of Stan that Mabel had made, Ford had pictured an amateurish effort. Not as a slight to Mabel, merely because she was still a child. Looking at the photo of the sculpture now, he couldn't help but be impressed. "You made that? All by yourself?"

"Yep! It was all full of my blood, sweat, tears, and other fluids," Mabel said.

"Well, you did a fantastic job on it," Ford said, trying not to think too hard about the rest of her comment. "It looks just like Stanley. Although, it is covered with more glitter than I'm used to seeing on him."

"That's my interpretation of his inner emotions," Mabel told him. "Plus it also makes him really sparkly.

"It was really sad when he got killed, though," Mabel continued, her mood turning somber as she gently traced the edges of one of the photos with her finger. "We even had a memorial service for him. Grunkle Stan bought a coffin, the cheapest one they had, I think, but he actually paid for it with real money. Then he ran out in the middle of giving the eulogy because he was crying too hard to keep going. We all thought he was just Grunkle Stan, being Grunkle Stan, but that was before we knew he had a long-lost twin brother." A long moment of silence stretched out between them, as Mabel looked morosely down at her scrapbook. Ford grew more and more uncomfortable as each second passed, uncertain of what he was supposed to say, what she wanted him to say.

Then, out of nowhere, Mabel snapped back to her usual cheerful self, so quick it practically gave him whiplash. "Whelp, I'm off to hang out with Candy and Grenda now," she said, flashing him a bright grin full of teeth and metalwork. "You can borrow the scrapbook for as long as you want, Grunkle Ford, just give it back when you're done. Okay, see you later, bye!" Mabel darted off, leaving Ford alone in the kitchen with the scrapbook still open. Almost accusatorially so, except Ford didn't think his niece was capable of that kind of malice.

He looked down at the open page in front of him, his hand reaching out unconsciously to touch the same picture that Mabel had been touching earlier. It featured Stanley grinning broadly, with one arm around his wax duplicate and the other hand pointing excitedly at his companion. They had at least a dozen pictures in their family photo albums, wherever those were, with Stan in the exact same pose, except it was Ford's shoulders that his arm had been slung around, while Ford regarded the camera with expressions with varying mixtures of exasperation and fondness. There was at least one, taken after Stan had won some trophy or other for boxing, where their positions were reversed, though rather than exasperated, Stan had been laughing his head off in that one, surprised and delighted by Ford's actions.

Ford slammed the scrapbook shut. He left it on the table as he took his food with him back down to the basement. He had work to do.


End file.
